


Pretty Girl from Rockwall

by MajorEnglishEsquire



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Accents, F/M, M/M, Pie, Pre-Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-24
Updated: 2013-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-06 09:46:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/734286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MajorEnglishEsquire/pseuds/MajorEnglishEsquire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This comes from a prompt on the LJ community "sherlockbbc_fic": "Sherlock discovers John has an (odd?) kink... He adores Southern accents."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pretty Girl from Rockwall

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this fic prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/6375.html?thread=29550311#t29550311). The fic was written to The Avett Brothers's Sixteen in July, [which you can listen to here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXaz-0-RMag). Title also in the Avett style.
> 
> I do not own the rights to the characters, setting, show, etc. No harm intended. Same goes for the above linked song which belongs to the Avett Brothers and is from _Four Thieves Gone: The Robbinsville Sessions_.

John doesn't heave a sigh when he rises for the seventh time. After six sighs in a row, the break in pattern bursts through Sherlock's mind like a tiny, sundrenched bulb bursting into root and interest begins growing. There's a whole garden of intrigue going on today, so this small fact comes in pretty far down the list, but it is worth a mental note.

He sets the root down in the sun and returns to the book at hand, dropping his nose nearly to the paper and inhaling the text. Another pattern emerges thirty-two minutes later. Each time John leaves the table to retreat back into the stacks, he is gone two minutes longer than the time previous.

John does not sigh the eighth time he leaves Sherlock's company, either.

Sherlock is scanning for the word "peeling."

«»

"Sweet tea," Joanna says, as John approaches. She's leaning on the desk and her head kind of lolls on top of her hand like she's daydreaming. She is dark-skinned but to John she is slightly luminous. In his mind's eye she is leaning against a creaking porch door and she's got a foot kicked out to the side and the way she drawls 'sweet tea' makes him want one like she wants one.

John smiles in sympathy.

"Yeah," Joanna says. "No sweet tea. Y'allve got hot tea out the wazoo and honey and lemon but no iced sweet tea. It's damn near a crime."

"Love sweet tea," John comments. "Love pecan pie," he adds.

Joanna's eyes roll into the back of her head and a breath gushes out of her. "Oooohhh, why'd you have to go and do that?"

John's face hurts from smiling so much. He speaks her language and he knows it and that is,... that is really just irresistible.

"Pecan _pie_ ," she moans. "You shut your mouth, boy. If we're gonna get into pies-- OH. My God. Are you going to make a southern girl wax poetical about a damn blueberry pie?" She glares and it's all mocking and dreamy. "What cha bothering me for again, anyway?" she pushes away from the desk and pulls the pen out of her hair. Her long locks, brass and hay, tumble down to her shoulder.

John relays the next list of subjects Sherlock has requested. The field of biology he's diving into for the Case of the Week is so obscure they had to visit the office of a foreign library inside of the London branch of an American university. The library is small and quiet and the division of books they need is rare and closely monitored. Joanna is here for a half-year study abroad program and, to pay her way, she mans the research desk that John has been obliged to plague all morning.

He's the first person she's really spoken to in weeks. It's his eighth time haunting her little desk and this time, instead of chatting with him from behind the stacks, she props the door open and waves him in. She licks her lips and rolls her hair back into a bun, pinning it with the biro.

Then Joanna disappears between the shelves.

Underneath a draping, plaid shirt, her white cami is sleeveless and John is really enjoying her shoulders at the moment, each time she reaches up and her collar shifts. Her honeyed skin looks so smooth and inviting. Stray curls fall on her neck and, oh, but that is monumentally distracting.

"Your boy is awful demanding," Joanna comments. "What do you do anyway, John? I mean I don't mind the comp'ny but this is a really specific field of study."

"We're on a case, actually. We consult a bit with the local police, Scotland Yard, the Met. That's Sherlock's job, anyway. 'Consulting detective.'"

Joanna gives a low whistle. "I didn't take you for police. Gimme a hand, hon."

Joanna climbs a stepstool and hands a few books behind her. John accepts them.

"It's just him, really. I'm supposed to be working part-time in a clinic."

"Supposed to be," she stops and hummms and drops her gaze to him. She can read it, he knows, read it all on him.

Southern women can read your secrets on your face like witches read tea leaves. And his face is no leathered mess, eyes narrowed by the sun, shaded by a wide brim. He must be easier than most.

She reaches up to her task again and, since there's no mystery about him anymore, he drinks in the sight of her tight denim stretching across her bum as she does so.

He follows her and they tease each other about pie some more, then beer. It makes him thirst mightily for a brown-bottled, long-necked, ice-fucking-cold beer, beads of condensation creeping down his fingers. He remembers Georgia again, like how he flashed there when he first approached Joanna's desk this morning. But instead of the sun and the wide fields and the blue pick-up truck he remembers evening turning into dusk, the beer his companions were too young for here, in their state, and sipping one after the other on a rickety roof. Heat fading to frog song. Soaked t-shirts cooling on their backs. The murmur and roll of conversation. Georgia girls. Red-headed Loo-zi-ana vixens. The syrup-thick voice and coal-black eyes of Dolly, from West Virginia. Her broad, toothy smile and pink, pink lips.

One summer, long ago, before he was a full-time scholar, then a doctor. Then a soldier, who, mysteriously, sang the same songs as his American comrades-in-arms. They who played him phone messages of their Mississippi girls and Texan loves and heartbroken little Kentucky fiancées.

He tried to learn the difference, over that summer and the Afghan tour that followed. And he can recognize Joanna's commanding Texan for what it is, but he wishes he knew better. He would soak in it, the same way they live in the south. Day to day, slow as molasses.

Joanna had asked him, in fact, on his second visit to her desk, the same thing his young companions had asked him too many times to count on his first few days visiting the American university. "Where's the fire, boy?"

Where, indeed? Of course, Sherlock's work is urgent, always urgent, usually lives hanging in the balance, but this woman's soft and subtle voodoo was an impenetrable wall of calm to him. He'd return to Sherlock's desk with barely a word and leave again, with a new list, without complaint. After all, where _was_ the fire?

This eighth time, Joanna keeps four of the books in her wiry, brown arms and follows John out to the main floor of the library. They set all the volumes down and exchange a couple goofy looks over Sherlock's sharply bent head. Joanna smirks, sighs a little, "mmm, weeell." She reaches out and squeezes John's arm briefly before heading back to her little hole-in-the-wall. 

John can taste the beer, can feel the sun on his skin, even in the bowels of this cold, dark library.

When Sherlock looks up next, John isn't worried about concealing the dopey grin he wears.

«»

Sherlock doesn't bring it up until they've handed over the last of the books and are headed out of the basement, up to street level.

"I believe you spent some time in the United States," he prompts.

John only nods. Sherlock doesn't press for details. Except that his eyes kind of _do_. John shrugs.

"Twice. I went to New York with Harry before I deployed and I went before, my first year of uni."

"To the south. Where _Joanna_ is from."

John spares only a slightly-surprised glance that Sherlock had paid enough attention to register the woman's name. He doesn't bother making a place distinction as he doubts Sherlock actually cares that much. Then they're climbing into a cab.

Sherlock instructs the driver not to take the tourist's route in the direction of the second crime scene. Then his eyes rove over John again and he says, "I spent some time in Florida. For Mrs. Hudson's case. A dreadful long time, actually."

John nods. "I've heard it's shit."

"Packed with tourists," Sherlock agreed. "But plenty'a nice enough people," he drawls in a cracked and horrible imitation of a swamp-raised cracker.

"Oh. My God," John cringes. "Please don't ever do that again."

"You fancy her, just a bit. I think." It wasn't like Sherlock to be hesitant in that kind of pronouncement.

John remembers the last grain of womanly wisdom Joanna had graced him with on his tenth and final visit back to her desk in the library.

"Boy, I will _not_ hesitate to beat you with one a them books." She smiled. "Go on. He doesn't seem like the type that takes kindly to waitin much."

With Sherlock something's always on fire. They're speeding off across the cold, crowded city and John does not doubt his place here.

He cocks his head, drinks in Sherlock's dark figure. He's tasted the summer heat, the open air, sweet iced tea, pilfered peaches from the tree, a honey-thick drawl on pink lips. He'll experience this, too, someday. "You know what I really fancy? Pie. Have you ever had sweet tea?"


End file.
